THE GREAT GREEN LAND GRAB
By Alan Caruba
Property rights were deemed so essential, so important to the economic future of America that the Founding Fathers wrote an Amendment to the United States Constitution to protect those rights, ensuring that private property could not be taken for public use “without just compensation.”
As far as environmentalists are concerned, private property rights are an impediment to the “protection” of what they always describe as “pristine” forests, deserts, or some horrid wilderness such as the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. ANWR is unfit for human habitation, but it does have countless thousands of caribou and several billion barrels of untapped oil beneath a “pristine” surface.
In a small state like New Jersey, land and its proper use have been a major concern from its earliest years. The State of New Jersey got its moniker, “the Garden State,” from the many farms in its southern half, although there are some in the north. One can drive up Route 78 through the northern portion and see horse farms and even cattle being raised.
Beyond its urban centers, there are large, verdant areas in which one can find small, picturesque suburbs and one of those areas is known as the Highlands. It is a 1,400- square-mile region, some 860,000 acres, extending from the northern border with New York and including land in Sussex, Warren, Passaic, Morris, and Hunterdon Counties.
The Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act was enacted in 2004 and signed into law by former Governor James McGreevey, whose lamentable and mercifully abbreviated term in office was cut short when, in the wake of a scandal concerning a young man McGreevey had put on the state payroll, the Governor announced he was a homosexual and resigned from office.
After the Water Protection and Planning Act was put into motion in 2006, the State’s largest daily newspaper, the Star-Ledger, editorialized:
The area in question is a watershed and the environmental claim was that any further construction or use of it posed a threat to water quality and that the area, home to abundant wildlife, needed to be subject to all manner of regulation and restrictions to protect it against the humans who had been living there since before the Revolution.
There never was a need for the Highlands Act. Existing environmental laws were and are sufficient, but the objective was to render the huge tract of land beyond any development, to reduce the value of its homes and other structures, and generally put it off limits. This kind of green gangsterism is part of the reason why, along with high taxation, and senseless spending, more people leave New Jersey than move here.
In 2007, northern New Jersey farmers and landowners affected by the Highlands Act made plans to contest it in court to prevent government-induced loss of equity and to protect private property rights. Consider this: Suppose you owned a home in this vast region and wanted to sell it. Who would buy it, knowing that you could not add a porch, a swimming pool, or even some swings for kids to play on? If you were a farmer, almost any normal act of tillage or harvest could be ruled a danger to the environment.
As a Star-Ledger columnist, Paul Mulshine, pointed out in July, 2007:
I was reminded of this appalling piece of environmentalist chicanery when a story appeared in the Star-Ledger in late January. “A report by Gov. Chris Christie’s transition team calls the Highlands Council ‘a disaster on multiple levels’ and recommends cutting the water-protection agency’s powers over local zoning or eliminating it.”
It has taken six years of suffering by the many landowners of the affected area and frustration among the many local officials in towns affected by this hideous land grab to finally reach a point where something might begin to be done to repeal the act and return the legislatively stolen property rights.
All around America, similar actions have been occurring, spurred on by various environmentalist groups, and all intended to drive out farmers and ranchers, to kill any development of any kind, and to abrogate the constitutional protection of private property in every way possible.
It is part of a vast matrix of efforts to destroy the nation’s economic growth, and it is too often successful. Given their antipathy to all human activity, if the Greens had their way, they would put up signs everywhere that would say, “Keep Out!”
The U.S. Constitution & the American Economic Order:
Civil Liberties -- Private Property Rights
Political Economy -- Philosophies, Systems, & Public Policies:
Government, the Economy, & Economic Prosperity
Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, commentator and business and science writer,
he is the Founder of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about "scare campaigns" designed to influence
public opinion and policy.
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